Who’s in charge: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach
Kansas plans to spend $4.6 million on election security grants over the next five years which will be spent on modernizing voting equipment, safeguarding voter rolls and auditing election results.
In September, The U.S. Election Assistance Commission released the Kansas plan for its share of the $380 million that Congress allocated to strengthen the state's cybersecurity systems amid threats from Russian and other foreign actors. Kansas has already received $4.34 million that it sought from the federal government under the program while the state matched those funds with an additional $219,000.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach inherited the massive voter-tracking program called the Interstate Crosscheck System, which holds voter registration data for 25 states. The system contains a list of more than 85 million voters that purportedly caught election fraud by weeding out double voting. The system also reportedly provided the numbers behind President Donald Trump’s baseless claim, after the 2016 election, that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” according to KCUR.
The tool was later found to contain security flaws and admittedly created a significant amount of false positives because of its simplified searches that use only first names, last names and birth dates.
